RELATED LINKS

AUSTIN,
Texas-After Carolina had struggled through an 85-67 defeat at Texas on
Wednesday night, three voices spoke loudest in the Tar Heel locker room.

The first,
of course, belonged to Roy Williams. It doesn't happen like the movies in this
situation. If the Carolina season was a film, the head coach would've come into
the Erwin Center visitor's locker room, drop-kicked a chair, given a rousing
speech, and everyone wearing blue would have immediately shot better, rebounded
better and probably even smelled better.

But it
doesn't happen that way here. The Tar Heels are 8-3 and have some problems that
require practice.

"We got our
butts kicked," Williams told his team, and that was a very adept summation.

Some of the Tar Heels have not been
in this situation. This team has played three probable NCAA Tournament teams,
and lost all three, with portions of each game an avert-your-eyes blowout.
Understandably, they are a little wobbly.

"The confidence issue is what we're
trying to figure out," said Marcus Paige, who had a team-high five assists.

You can see it on the court.
Instead of instinctively moving to the right spot, they're not quite sure they
should trap here (it's telling that Williams, a coach who has always strongly
preferred not to trap on the road, believing it can create momentum for the
home crowd and home team, used a trap relatively liberally against the
Longhorns), not completely certain they should penetrate there. It's just a
half-step, maybe less, but it might be the difference between pursuing a loose
ball with reckless abandon as compared to getting there just after the other
team is headed the opposite direction.

They need confidence, but they need
something good to happen on the court to have confidence. But they need
confidence before something good can happen on the court. Right this second,
they are every 21-year-old filling out his or her first job application who is
being told they need to get more experience to get the job, but they can't get
a job to get the experience.

Enter the
second voice. This one was wearing a navy Carolina sweatsuit and came with the
swagger born of professional success. There are Tar Heels in the locker room
who probably know Danny Green only as a San Antonio Spurs standout, as a player
so valuable that head coach Gregg Popovich earns a $250,000 fine just for
sending Green home to get an extra night's rest rather than playing him in a
game against the Miami Heat.

But there
is so much more to Green than that. His story includes the NBDL and a place
even tougher--Chapel Hill when he wasn't sure he was going to be able to figure
out all these burdens that a demanding coach was placing on him. He once turned it over three times in nine minutes against Clemson. He shot 0-of-5 against Maryland.

Green and
the Spurs had the night off, and it's less than a two-hour drive from San
Antonio to Austin. He sat in the fifth row behind the Carolina bench with
fellow letterman Jesse Holley, and what he saw looked familiar. When he struggled, he watched and learned from Reyshawn Terry. Now, seven years later, he's in the position to dispense some wisdom. So when it was
over, Green went from player to player in the locker room, preaching the same
message: confidence.

"Whatever
you do, stay confident," he told a group of three Tar Heels, who were giving
him their complete attention. You probably see Danny Green and think of
freshman year struggles, Jump Around (old memories die hard, and even now, when
he is so much more than just a guy who dances, one Tar Heel fan hollered, "Show
us a dance, Danny!" as Green sat down in the Carolina section), heat checks
and, of course, Greg Paulus.

But the
current Tar Heels look at Green and most of them don't know any of that. They
see one thing: he's in the NBA. He's a valuable member of one of the best teams
in professional basketball. So as Green told them, "Be a threat on the court,
don't just settle. Be confident in yourself," they listened as if he was giving
them explicit directions to Santa's workshop.

I promise:
however much you think you love Danny Green--and we're talking about one of the
most popular players of the Williams era--you would've loved him more if you
could've seen him coaching up the Tar Heels. I don't know what NBA players
normally do on their nights off. But Green was here, an hour's drive away from home,
doing whatever he could to help the Tar Heels.

"DG is trying to pick us up," Paige said, "and it means a lot right now."

Across the
locker room, Reggie Bullock was knotting his tie. He had nothing else to say,
because he'd already spoken his mind. When the Tar Heels returned to the locker
room after the loss, the Kinston native was frank with his teammates.

"We can't
keep playing like this," he told them. "If we keep playing like this, teams are
going to keep kicking our butts. We have to go out there and be able to turn
the game around. We have to do exactly what Coach wants us to do."

You get the
sense that Wednesday night gave Bullock a window into exactly how critical he
is to this Tar Heel team. Bullock led the team in points and rebounds. When he
and James Michael McAdoo were productive--the duo combined to score 19 of
Carolina's 25 points in one stretch through the middle of the second half--the
Tar Heels were formidable. When they weren't--neither scored in the game's final
7:48--things fell apart.

Bullock's value might be even greater than that, because when Williams talks about the need to "buy in"--Williams, Paige and Bullock all independently mentioned the phrase as a needed area of improvement--no one questions whether Bullock is already invested. "I thought Reggie was the one guy who I would say played so much harder than everybody else and used some intelligence with it," Williams said.

Bullock is
clinically incapable of being selfish. But he is one of Carolina's best
players. He had a relatively open look at a corner three-pointer with 2:30 left
and the Tar Heels down nine, but swung the ball instead to Marcus Paige. The
freshman indisputably had a more open look, which is exactly what Bullock was
thinking. But at that time and at that score, the Tar Heels need their junior
to be the player who takes that shot.

"I'm an
unselfish player," Bullock said. "But there are times when I have to get a
little more aggressive. That comes with time and experience and being a leader
of this team."

His
experience is exactly what caused him to speak up after the game. He knows the
Tar Heels are in a perilous spot. They do not have a signature nonconference
win. Their only wins right now, as Roy Williams said after the game, "we
should've won because we were more gifted."

Conference
play is still two weeks away, but you can tell Bullock wants changes now. He's
been around and he knows how difficult those ACC wins will be to earn. He's not
panicked, but he is realistic.

The Tar Heels are likely to find
lots of people offering advice in the days to come. The challenge now is to
identify the ones who offer some value (the most significant one is fairly
obvious, because he's located in the big office in the Smith Center and he has
lots of shiny rings), and then do the one thing that's needed most: listen.